ARE ROBOCALLS AND FRAUDSTERS RUINING YOUR BRAND?

Seven Steps to Get Calls Answered and Restore Trust in the Phone.

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Robocalls, Call Spoofing, and Fraud Are Wreaking Havoc on Call Completion Rates.Your customers don’t know who’s really calling – and they’re not picking up calls.

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But, That’s Not All. It’s great news that Congress and the FCC have stepped in to address the call spoofing epidemic, mandating that all U.S. voice carriers implement STIR/SHAKEN call authentication in the IP portion of their networks by June 2021.

That rating is used as input into a blocking algorithm and your calls may end up being labeled as spam or blocked. That can negatively impact your brand and your business.

But while the intent is good, the result may be that legitimate calls from authentic businesses like yours are given a low attestation rating.

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Take Back Control.In spite of the many digital options available, and regardless of age group, research shows that consumers prefer the personal touch and reassurance the phone offers, especially when verifying highly personal or urgent information. Enterprises must find new solutions to protect a critical component of their customer service practice.

The good news is that technology has advanced, allowing businesses to reduce erroneous call blocking while adding richer identity and context to their calls. Many enterprises are integrating solutions and technology into their systems, while also taking measures to prepare for the impact of STIR/SHAKEN. According to Forrester Consulting, the implementation of trusted call solutions will lead to both customer and operational business benefits, and early adopters are already seeing operational gains.

The outbound call channel is a critical point of interaction with customers, especially for high-value communications.

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See Where You Are in the Seven-Step Trusted Call Journey.

Our experts have developed a seven-step journey to guide you through specific steps to help you integrate trusted call solutions into your solutions and processes:

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STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5 STEP 6 STEP 7

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Centralization

Improving your outbound calling results, while protecting your customers and business, starts with verifying the legitimacy of your organization, business purpose, calling behavior, and ownership of telephone numbers. Most businesses use numerous numbers, sourced from multiple service providers. You need to be seen as the legitimate call originator for all your numbers – across the entire call environment of voice carriers, call analytics programs, and mobile applications – or your calls may be wrongly blocked or tagged as spam.

Validate identity across the calling environment.

You can:

� Validate your business details, inventory of telephone numbers and caller data

� Manage, monitor and update this information across the calling environment

� Remediate any errors in identity for your numbers across the calling environment

STEP 1

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ContactSTEP 2

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Connect with confidence.

Many outbound dials fail to connect with consumers. The phone number on file may be incorrect or rarely used by the consumer. A consumer record may list multiple phone numbers, without any indication of usage frequency. The call may occur at a time when the consumer is unlikely to answer their phone. These variables depress RPC rate and operational efficiency.

Achieve higher right-party contact rates.Leveraging predictive phone behavior intelligence allows you to:

� Understand which phone number is most likely to be answered

� Know what time-of-day and day-of-week each consumer is most likely to answer their phone

� Prioritize which numbers to dial to maximize operational efficiency

� Mitigate the risk of non-compliance with the TCPA or the CFPB’s Regulation F

� Correct and append incorrect or incomplete CRM records

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ConsistencySTEP 3

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Enable an accurate call display.

Business phone numbers often display inconsistent, inaccurate, or even blank caller ID names due to variations across internal systems and processes. But, when customers aren’t sure who’s calling, they aren’t likely to answer the phone.

It’s important that you:

� Ensure the correct calling number is displayed

� Verify which names are assigned to each telephone number

� Measure the performance of caller names and adjust for greater answer rates

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You said:

48%Customer frustration/decreased customer satisfaction

39%Loss of customers/customer churn

48%Increased operation costs

37%Loss of revenue

43%Lost productivity

12%Fines/lawsuits for noncompliance with regulations

When Asked About Your Challenges in Contacting Customers…

Why Customers Won’t Take Your Calls, Forrester Consulting, July 2019.Why Customers Won’t Take Your Calls, Forrester Consulting, July 2019.

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ConnectionSTEP 4

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Ensure calls get through.

Often, businesses may not even realize their calls are being blocked or tagged until they receive negative feedback from their customers.

Consider taking steps to:

� Understand your baseline call patterns to identify telephone numbers (TNs) wrongly blocked or tagged

� Register TNs across the caller ID ecosystem

� Monitor changes to the reputation of your registered TNs

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Top Reasons Customers Don’t Answer the Phone

64%

48%

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45%

35%

Unknown caller

Call spoofing

Fraud

Call fatigue/frequency of contact

Robocalls

Why Customers Won’t Take Your Calls, Forrester Consulting, July 2019.

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CertaintySTEP 5

Protect your brand from abuse by spoofers.

Monitoring the use of your brand across the caller ID ecosystem helps to protect your reputation and your customers and minimize your risk of liability.

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To do so, you can:

� Designate inbound, outbound, and bi-directional telephone numbers

� Register inbound only numbers as Do-Not-Originate

� Monitor third-party TN caller name registrations for similar caller names

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CertificationSTEP 6

Authenticate caller identity.

Take the following action to specify how your outbound calls are assessed through STIR/SHAKEN to make sure they’re not blocked or marked as spam:

� Understand the impacts and limitations of STIR/SHAKEN standards

� Verify your STIR/SHAKEN attestation levels

� Integrate STIR/SHAKEN standards into your network and mobile apps and sign outbound calls, verify inbound calls, and secure end-to-end calls

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ContextSTEP 7

Enhance the mobile call display.

The more consumers feel they can trust an incoming call, the more likely they are to answer.

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Consider your device as valuable real estate to:

� Branded Call Display (BCD), a solution by Neustar, a TransUnion company, to add logos, images, social media, reason for the call and more to the mobile display

� Provide expanded name information, caller title, department, and location

� Add call context with targeted message for a personalized brand experience Display the call authentication / verification result 13

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You said:

Why Customers Won’t Take Your Calls, Forrester Consulting, July 2019.

When Asked What Benefits You Expect from a Trusted Call Experience…

69%Better customer experience/customer satisfaction

55%Increased revenues

64%Higher answer rates

50%Operational efficiencies

61%Improved customer retention

43%Increased regulatory compliance

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Restoring Trust in the Phone Channel.

Taking these steps will definitely get you on the road to restoring confidence with your customers, achieving higher call answer rates, and increasing operational efficiency.

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Visit our Trusted Call Solutions Hub.

You’ll learn more about solutions that can help you on your seven-step outbound calling journey, and have access to valuable resources, tips, and elearning.

Take our outbound calling assessment.

Get immediate insights into where your organization is in the seven-step Trusted Call Journey.

Learn more about Branded Call Display (BCD).

You can add context to calls so customers know it’s you calling, and answer the phone.

Learn More.Neustar is a pioneer in call authentication as the co-author of STIR standards and early contributor to the SHAKEN framework, and we play an ongoing leadership role in defining industry standards with ATIS, IETF and CRTC. We provide the industry’s reference implementation of STIR/SHAKEN as the exclusive operator of the ATIS Robocalling Testbed, where real world STIR/SHAKEN implementations are being tested for interoperability, and Neustar leads the industry in commercial call authentication deployments.

Contact us at 1-855-898-0036.

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